Maybe instead of talking about climate change, which is a symptom and not the problem, we should talk about “destabilising the atmosphere”.
I feel like people will find it harder to use nonsense arguments if they’re confronted with the problem rather than the explanation.
> Yet the most interesting findings come from looking at data from the Heartland Institute. In fact, the thinktank used the two terms with roughly the same frequency until 2013, when we finally see a decoupling as the use of global warming dropped while the use of climate change remained constant.
> This shows that “global warming” was widely used by climate change deniers over this 30-year period. Perhaps this is because the phrase is relatively specific, which allowed them to contrast it with simple arguments like saying that the planet cannot be warming as it’s cold outside.
https://theconversation.com/there-is-no-evidence-that-global...
Or, more bluntly, "planetary fuckups."
Habitat loss, chemical pollution, overfishing, and microplastics are others, all leading to very bad things on their own.
Climate change is the big one though.
Sorry, but that is even more opaque.
"It looks fine to me!"
Try to explain what happens with an unstable atmosphere and why we need it... and you are better off going with global warning.
The problem is that we don't know what is going to happen. We aren't great at figuring the weather in two weeks. Then look an credit cards where we know and understand the consequences and penalties... and people STILL act irresponsibly.
You have to provide very specific and likely negative outcomes to specific regions.
Sometimes I feel like nothing short of a collapse of the agricultural system and a subsequent famine-triggered civil war killing people's immediate family members is going to wake them up.
I hear key aquifers like the Colorado river are drying up, so it's probably even a fairly likely scenario within the next decade too...
Nobody wants to do anything about something that's only going to affect people decades in the future.